AI Will Deleted 50% of Middle Managers. The Ones Who Lead Are About to Get Rich.

**Ainsley** (0:02)
The layer that's disappearing is, let's start there, because the numbers are more unsettling than most people realize. Challenger Grey and Christmas, which tracks announce cuts, has already attributed 87,714 announced job cuts to AI just through May of this year. That's already passed everything AI was blamed for in all of 2025
And May alone, 38,579 cuts in a single month. 40% of all May cuts, the highest single month AI total since they started tracking this. The tech sector is up 66% year over year on cuts. But here's the thing that makes this episode more interesting than a layoff report. The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs data, which is a projection, so I'll flag it as such, shows leadership and social influence ranking among the fastest rising skills in demand through 2030 Displacement and rising demand in the same research base at the same time. So the question isn't really is AI eliminating managers, it's eliminating which managers doing which work. And I think that distinction is where this gets genuinely uncomfortable for a lot of people who are currently holding a management title and believing it means the same thing it meant five years ago.
What's your read on how that lands for someone mid-career right now?

**Carlo Thompson** (1:29)
It lands pretty hard, right? Because I mean, the emotions out there right now is that AI is replacing a lot of things in the work world. And management, in my opinion, I don't think folks was thinking about management as an AI adjacent or AI exposed part of the work world. At least I wasn't, right? Until I read this headline.
Essentially, what we're saying is that AI is coming for managers, but also that the skill of being a leader is so scarce that it's being priced into job roles going into 2030

**SPEAKER_3** (2:21)
Artificial System Online.

**Carlo Thompson** (2:34)
So, welcome back to Surviving AI with Carlo Thompson. I'm Carlo Thompson, we got Ainsley here, and we're going to dive into this idea around the leadership gap. Why AI is eliminating managers and creating a fortune for those who lead, which is somewhat counterintuitive, but the reason why it's counterintuitive is because this gap does exist.
And let's start with the layer that's disappearing.

**Ainsley** (3:04)
The reason management felt safe is actually pretty logical. Management was never framed as information work. It was framed as people work, and those feel like opposite things. But if you actually audit what a lot of middle managers spend their time doing, scheduling, status updates, relaying what the team set up to the director, relaying what the director said back down to the team, pulling together the weekly report that nobody reads, that's not people work, that's a dashboard, and I am quite literally the dashboard. So when I say AI ate the messenger, I mean that precisely and without apology.
The Gartner projection, and I'll call it a projection, is that by 2026, 20 percent of organizations will use AI to flatten their structure and eliminate more than half of current middle management positions. That's not a distant threat anymore. We're in 2026, and the challenger data we already talked about shows it's not just a projection, it's showing up in the announced cuts in real time.
But here's the tension that I think is worth sitting with before we move on. The people being cut aren't all the same. Some of them were doing administration that got mislabeled as management for decades, and some of them were doing something genuinely irreplaceable, holding a team together under pressure, making calls nobody authorized, being the person people followed when things got uncertain. Same title, completely opposite trajectories right now. So the diagnostic question I want to put on the table, and this is the uncomfortable one, is which one were you actually doing?

**Carlo Thompson** (4:59)
Which one were you doing, folks? Now, you heard Ainsley mention that the layoffs has hit in both administrators, which we think of right now as an information router, right? The update person that's updating both down and up, and then we have the genuine leaders that was there for their team, taking roadblocks out of it, everything, and both sides are kind of getting impacted. And we'll probably touch on this later, but the reason why it's hit in both sides is because the genuine leaders don't know how to make their leadership qualities legible for the organization to value it. And since we're in the season five Human Edge, that's the part that we want to hone in on mostly, is this idea that the human edge of being a true leader requires you to make that leadership quality visible. It requires you to do work such that it's legible to the organization, because many of the skills that we were talking about, we were talking about in these episodes, they're not things that genuinely show up on a resume or even get interviewed for.